Cons:

I spot him as he sprints into a building and -- despite feeling the impulse to shoot -- hold my fire and await a cleaner shot. Crouching behind a wall, I nervously watch the windows for movement, and debate whether to hold my position, or to follow him through the doorway.

But then I remember I'm not playing those other first-person shooters -- this is Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I equip my grenade launcher, take aim at the wall, and blast a hole so big that my once-safe foe now has only a moment to turn and look as my bullets rain through the gaping maw I put in his cover. Victory is sweet.

Destructible cover isn't anything new in shooters (and certainly not to DICE's Battlefield franchise), but no game I've played has ever implemented it as well as Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In the past, "destructible environments" meant I could blow apart a few boards or shatter a few windows, but here, almost everything save the heartiest buildings (or pieces thereof) can be shattered to bits, given enough explosive power. With plenty of grenades or rockets on your person -- not to mention a host of conveniently placed combustibles scattered through the environments -- this translates to a shift in play style: Players are both empowered with the ability to create their own avenues for attack and escape, and imbued with a sense of insecurity when they linger in cover too long. The result is a game where everyone except snipers is almost always moving, creating a battlefield that's constantly changing from moment to moment and giving players plenty of reasons to use destructible terrain to their advantage.

The tech that allows such wanton destruction wouldn't matter if the game sucked, but BFBC2 makes for a downright awesome time, both online and (surprisingly) in its single-player campaign. Controlling one of the titular Bad Company -- a group of loveable, wonderfully written miscreants who go on what often amount to suicide missions -- I shot, blasted, and drove my way through one of the most thrilling single-player shooters I've ever played. The pacing is excellent; the campaign mixes things up regularly with vehicle and ground combat segments, the characters add levity to the most intense situations with their hilarious dialogue, and the destructible environments allowed me to mix up my tactics for each skirmish. And though it's still a linear story, DICE crafted a lush world that's open enough as to never make you feel like you're running down a one-way corridor (that is, of course, unless that's what you're literally doing), but focused to the point where you can spend your time gawking and participating in the gorgeous spectacle of the battlefield, rather than trying to figure out where to go.

The campaign is a blast, but the staying power for BFBC2 lies in its multiplayer. Battlefield's traditional capture-and-hold Conquest mode returns in BFBC2, along with a few forms of Rush (wherein teams take turns attacking and defending a series of points on a field that, once lost, push the defenders further back into the map), and a Squad Deathmatch mode in which small teams compete to see who can rack up the requisite kill-count first. After so many years and so many Battlefield games, Conquest is still a ton of fun, but Rush and Squad Deathmatch are also welcome ways to vary your online time. Team Rush games are generally long, drawn-out affairs in which players fight a series of pitched battles around shifting pairs of objectives (effectively keeping the fight focused on specific geographical areas of the map), while the smaller scale of Deathmatch and Squad Rush make them shorter and more frantic, though they still demand a good deal of teamwork. No mode feels thrown in for the sake of a back-of-the-box bullet point; each is a testament to the experience and legacy that DICE has in creating wonderful online shooters that somehow manage to mix the chaos of infantry firefights with tanks, jeeps, boats, helicopters, and more.

On top of all that, BFBC2 adds variety to playtime by sticking to the franchise's M.O. Players can be Engineers, medics, snipers, or the standard run and gun soldier; in BFBC2 it's all about picking a class that suits your play style and, more importantly, the needs of the battlefield at that point in time. But even beyond picking your basic role, BFBC2 allows for further customization of a class: Weapons, equipment, and specializations can change (even mid-fight) to suit your tastes. Of course, all the weapons et al are constantly unlocked through both playtime with a specific class, and by points acquired on the your overall profile, providing a proverbial carrot-on-a-stick that keeps addictive personalities like my own online far past bedtime. And though I'm all down for making players earn the items they give to their classes, I wish they'd change the current default settings for the medic and engineer classes, as it's absolutely ridiculous that they don't have med packs or tools unlocked from the get-go.

Sure, a number of minor things got under my skin (some painfully spread-out checkpoints, crappy multiplayer unlocks, and a few bad online spawn points), but they'll scarcely prevent it from marching into the homes of millions of people for me to blow up. It's kind of like DICE has trained for a game development biathlon, resulting in its first game where the single-player mode is just as good as the multiplayer -- and that says DICE has what it takes to be among the best in the business. In times when "modern" is the word-of-the-day for military-themed shooters, Bad Company 2 proves you don't need to stand at the top of the medal podium -- you simply blow it to goddamn smithereens.